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Definition
In literature, the representation of Jews in terms of certain negative stereotypes. In Western culture, anti-Jewish prejudice, although present in a few classical writers, is primarily rooted in the New Testament. The Gospels in fact introduce the figures who were to become the basis of enduring individual Jewish stereotypes: Herod, the slaughterer of children; and Judas, the betrayer (for a price) of Christ. But a far more potent stereotype, the depiction of the Jews as a race of "Christ-killers," produced a legacy that has distorted, as few events have, the history of the West. Particularly ironic is that, like Jesus himself, the authors of the Gospels were Jews. By the late middle ages, these biblical descriptions had developed into literary stereotypes. The image of Jews as child murderers constitutes the main action of "The Prioress's Tale" in The Canterbury Tales (1380–1400); the association of Jewish behavior with both treason and avarice surfaces in the morality plays, and the representation of Jews as responsible for the crucifixion is a recurring feature of mystery plays. Medieval Europe also gave birth to anti-Semitic legends such as the story of the wandering Jew.In English Renaissance drama, two plays by its two greatest dramatists helped to perpetuate the myth of the Jew as arch-villain. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (1590) catered to a current of anti-Semitism, but the other play, Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (1595), has given birth to a host of controversial and conflicting interpretations in print, on stage, and in society as a whole. On the one hand, Shylock, the play's fierce, Christian-hating moneylender, is a stereotypical villain who launched a thousand anti-Semitic progeny; on the other, he is one of Shakespeare's greatest dramatic achievements whose "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech echoes through time as a searing denunciation of anti-Semitism. He is, in the critic Harold Bloom's words, "a permanently equivocal trouble to all of us."In the 18th century anti-Semitism appears regularly in the writings of Voltaire, whose celebrated commitment to tolerance apparently did not include Jews and Catholics.The 19th-century novel maintained the "villain Jew" stereotype in the characters of Fagin in Oliver Twist (1837–39) and Svengali in George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894). Much more subtle are the references to rich and greedy Jewish bankers in the novels of Honoré de Balzac and Henry James.The attempt to represent a pro-Semitic point of view is evident in Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1820) and George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876), but the Jewish characters in these novels, while positive, are equally stereotypical. No one, it seemed, could get it right until June 16, 1904, the fictional date when Leopold Bloom left his house to walk the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses (1922). Bloom is not defined by his Jewishness; it is merely one facet of his unique, memorable, complex character.Twentieth-century writers charged with harboring anti-Semitic attitudes include the poet Ezra Pound and the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, both of whom were active supporters of Fascist regimes and were outspoken in their denunciation of Jews. A name recently added to this list is that of Paul De Man, one of the leading exponents of deconstruction.The long tradition of "polite" anti-Semitism in France has been examined recently by the critic Jeffrey Mehlman, who has argued that this attitude is reflected in the lives and writings of four prominent 20th-century literary figures: the novelist André Gide, the playwright Jean Giraudoux, and the prominent critical theorists Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Lacan. Mehlman makes it clear that most of the evidence for these attitudes derives from the writings of these men before the Nazis transformed social snobbery into an unimagined horror—that is, before anyone was aware of the extremes to which anti-Semitism might be put. Nevertheless, Mehlman suggests that those attitudes contributed to an atmosphere that made possible the Holocaust.
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